Curly hair

Okay, an admission: My hair is naturally curly to wavy. Curly on the ends, wavy in the middle. Every other day, I wash and blow-dry it straight, and then put it briefly in hot-rollers, to both smooth out any excessive curl, and coax what’s left into tamer waves. On the off days, it gets a rest from the heat of the blow-dryer, and it’s much faster to get ready.

Yesterday, I wanted to sleep in an extra thirty minutes. It occurred to me, that if I let my hair go, I could shave at least forty minutes off of my getting ready time. I could at least tie it back in a bun, and it wouldn’t be too out of control. So that’s what I did, pretty happily. I bundled most of it back into a loose bun, and put on a skinny headband to keep the short curls out of my face.

It looked pretty good. Throughout the day, I wondered why I do that, why I go through this routine every day of coaxing my hair into something it is not. I guess I like to predict, or control, and know what my hair will look like, on any given day. If I let it dry naturally, it will be curly-wavy, and it might look okay, or it might look kind of out-of-control and crazy. And once it dries like that, I can’t exactly get it back. If I blow it dry and hot roll it, I can predict and know exactly what it will look like, all day long.

I guess I’m riffing off of the whole Lenten bare-faced experiment, but I’m thinking of letting my hair go, once in a while. We shall see.